Slingbox TV, Anyone?

Waiting patiently for our new CB to arrive replacing our big ol Dutchstar that has served us well for the past 8 years.
We have a Winegard Traveler satellite dish on the DS and it will go with the bus. Technology has changed a lot in the last 8 years and I would like to eliminate satellite TV completely with something else. One device that keeps popping up is the Slingbox.
Anyone use or have used a Slingbox and if so, how does it work? The website claims it will sling your current home TV subscription to anywhere in the world with a decent internet connection.

Thank you for your valued comments.

We use SlingBox all the time to watch our home DirecTV. Works great. It excels at taking advantage of low-bandwidth situations. The image degrades gracefully down to very low bandwidths, which produces very blocky, but still watchable pictures.

We have used Slingbox A LOT!!!!!! when we lived in Saudi Arabia for 3-1/2 years. We loved it! It is economical (one-time purchase; no ongoing subscription needed) and extremely simple to set up and to use. If you have family still at home while you are away, then you may want to get another cable box to connect to your Slingbox so that you are not both trying to control the same cable box. We did that by connecting to an existing second cable box for a basement TV that was rarely/never used. We recorded our favorite programs (i.e. hockey games) and then watched at our convenience.

One thing that can be an issue... it uses a lot of data over the internet. In Saudi Arabia the internet speed was slow and so the picture resolution sometimes was very poor. You are essentially streaming video from your home cable box over the internet to your laptop/iPad/Smartphone. Slingbox automatically adjusts resolution to match internet speed. Also if your internet plan has limited data (either sending from home or receiving on the road) you coud quickly run out. I think one hockey game took about 2-3 GB of data.

But so long as internet speed and monthly data quota are not problems, Slingbox is great!! I'm just starting my van conversion to RV and plan to use Slingbox while on the road. I still need to look into a cellular mobile hotspot with a good data package. If anyone has advice on that in Canada, I'm all ears.

Streaming video over your campsite’s WiFi network will be hit and miss too?

Chat with your favourite camp operators before planning on consuming a lot of band width. Most of the spots we frequent have home spun networks with a couple of hot spots scattered haphazardly around the grounds, all funneled through a 10/100 hub to a domestic grade router and a residential cable modem. That was fine back in the day for customers to pull down email, but is not nearly up to the task of streaming video out to 100 campers with 4K flat screens wanting to watch the hockey game (and still see the player’s numbers, let alone the puck). Your sat dish will likely have better, dedicated bandwidth (when you’re not behind a tree)?

-dave (who admittedly likes cheaper, woodsy camp grounds ;-)